Paradoxes

Summary:

Chronotech questions

Paradoxes

TauCeti 25 Feb 2014 19:58

As is often the case, I'm getting myself a bit confused with a few details of Colin's model of time.

The specific hypothetical situation is as follows:

Ramla is investigating a possible Darwinist. She's broken into his home and is about to open a storage locker when she receives a chronotech message from herself: “Stop! It blew off my arm!”

Being a smart prophet, she carefully verifies that the locker is trapped before sending anything back and freeing her bandwidth.¹

Now, Ramla knows that she doesn't lie when sending messages, so she sends back a new message: “Stop! It's explosive!”

What happens?

I can see a few possible answers:

1. She sends back the new message and… nothing changes? This implies branching timelines in the classic sense, not a single timeline.
2. She sends back the new message and we retcon the last few minutes such that that was what she sent originally.
3. She's forced to send back the original message, despite not wanting to lie.
4. The original message was inconsistent with her personality: the GM should have worded it as “Stop! It might blow off your arm!” or better: “Stop! It's a trap!”. This was a GMing mistake, mea culpa.

Footnotes

1. If the reason isn't obvious, I'd be happy to explain why you should never, ever send a message back before you've verified it when I'm GM.

Last edited on 26 Feb 2014 02:03 by TauCeti Show more

Re: Paradoxes

TauCeti 25 Feb 2014 20:03

The Stochastic Chronotech answer, for the curious:

All Chronotech messages need to come with a 'likelyhood'; you can't just have a clear message (well, you can if the player is over-filtering, but that's their mistake). The GM should have said: "You get a low probability whisper from the future: 'Stop! It blew off my arm!', along with several variants." Ramla is not obliged to send anything back at all.

If the GM is confident that Ramla will send back a warning despite not technically needing to, he'll have her receive the warning as a high probability message and the scary whisper as a low probability one. This requires knowing one's players and their characters, of course.

Last edited on 26 Feb 2014 02:04 by TauCeti Show more

Re: Paradoxes

Colin_Fredericks 27 Feb 2014 17:51

For the sake of playability, #2 is most likely. Behind the scenes, the universe basically "retcons" every time someone sends a message back, so #2 is actually the most accurate.

#3 is what probably happens most often - you just record the message you got and send it back at the proper time, because you don't know what the outcome will be if you get a different message. "Forced" is the wrong word, though.

It is technically possible that the message actually degraded in transmission to the point where that change happened on its own, but it doesn't seem super-likely. You'd be more likely to receive “Storp! It blew off my orm!” which would make you wonder if you were turning into Coach Z, but would probably also keep you from opening the locker.

Information is everything.

Re: Paradoxes

TauCeti 27 Feb 2014 21:39

That works pretty well, yeah.

I can see a rather extreme situation arising with smart players and a GM willing to go that rout: a player or players get a bad outcome and carefully craft a message to avoid it; this can cause a retcon so severe that the story needs to be rewound a bit and continued from there. Anything from the original playthrough (other than the message) falls into the "Instant Death Cutscene Rule", in the sense that the player (and thus the themes system) can interact with it, but the character can't. Indeed, I wouldn't refund twists when backing up, although the original results from twists spent in the first playthrough will happen in the new playthrough as well, without requiring further twists to be spent.

Last edited on 27 Feb 2014 21:40 by TauCeti Show more

Re: Paradoxes

Colin_Fredericks 27 Feb 2014 21:42

Yeah, I intend to handle this kind of thing primarily through GM and player advice and through Theme use.

I'm also writing things as much as "pull from the future" as I can, as opposed to "push to the past".

Re: Paradoxes

TauCeti 27 Feb 2014 22:39

Oh, definitely. Honestly, if my players have to make such a large retcon, I probably messed up as GM; the info should have already arrived in the first playthrough.